If someone had 3 eyes, would they trink?

The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.

Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.

Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.

Ghost of Tsushima is not quite as big as more recent Ubisoft games, though. Valhalla was just a stupidly large game with not much meaningful content in it. Just big for the sake of being big.

I heard that Shadows was supposed to be a bit smaller, but guessing they still don’t know how to really pare down the scale to match the content.

As someone who played waaaaaay too much of the original game back in the day and was very concerned about a remaster doing it justice, I have to say it turned out about as well as it possibly could have.

It didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel or make fixes for things that weren’t broken (other than the leveling, at least), it just turned Oblivion into a modern game while still being Oblivion deep down inside.

I am curious to hear perspectives on what Skyrim-only players think about it, because while the Oblivion remake is arguably now the most modernized Elder Scrolls game, it still doesn’t have some of the gameplay and QoL improvements that later came to Skyrim. It’s a perfect remaster for me, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are folks out there thinking, “Why is there no dual wielding,” “What’s with the weird zoomed in dialog system,” “Where are all the skill perks,” or “Why are there no NPC companions,” and similar.

I also do hope that Bethesda or the community releases an updated version of the construction set soon so the modding scene can take off again for the game. From what I hear, the original Oblivion construction set is able to be used in the remaster with a good deal of messing around, but modders don’t currently have the tools needed to interact at all with the Unreal Engine 5 wrapper.

Something like this would probably work well:

My favorite ensemble is Scissorhands

You and me both. I am still upset by the fact that my state had RCV on the ballot several years ago but voted it down because the majority-Democrat politicians in office here were afraid to endorse anything that might erode the party’s dominance.

God forbid a left-leaning state run the risk of electing actual leftists.

Sorta, but not to let the Democrats off the hook either, with their uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Chuck Schumer and his conspirators can never be forgiven for agreeing to pass the Trump budget that is now funding his agenda.

Schumer’s entire argument that they should play along until Trump’s approval rating hits some arbitrarily low number is infuriating, and reeks of the sort of calculated politicking where the only priority is to do whatever it takes to stay in power, rather than to do the right thing. Hope that bites him and the others who voted with him in the ass.

The very real push to vote for Trump or not vote at all due to Biden’s botched (to say the least) handling of Palestine was not in good faith, though, and I saw that type of rhetoric everywhere.

Edit Downvote me and don’t bother responding you coward who can’t face up to the genocide being directly facilitated and endorsed by the U.S.

I didn’t downvote you, for what that’s worth, so I hope that’s not directed at me. But shame on me regardless I guess.

I do think that is giving liberals and the left too much credit.

A lot of the infighting from among the left during the past election felt pretty artificial, to be perfectly honest, and most of the “Genocide Joe/Holocaust Harris” types seemed to just evaporate after the election ended. Maybe just because there was nothing really left to say after all was said and done, but I just find it hard to believe much of that discourse was in good faith. I’m surprised to read a number as low as 18%, but almost 1 in 5 still isn’t nothing.

It’s not so much that the Supreme Court is being ignored as much as it is that they refuse to do anything about it. They’ll offer some occasional platitudes by ruling against Trump to make the public think that the system is still working as designed, but stop just short of actually enforcing those rulings.

Trump is a Republican.

Congress is controlled by Republicans.

The Supreme Court is majority Republican.

The other branches of government could stop this but they’re all enabling this to happen.

Wouldn’t be much of a point, though. Skyblivion is already just about done. If they C&D it later this year, there will still be a 99% finished Skyblivion floating around on various hosting sites that they’d never be able to stop people from getting their hands on. Basically I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not Microsoft/Zenimax would want to kill the project to boost their own profits, but rather if they even could at this point, and I think the answer is no. A few years ago may have been a different story, but that ship has sailed.

It’s not the same sort of situation as teams making mods or romhacks of Nintendo games who (foolishly) announce it early and get C&D’d immediately before there’s anything to play. Skyblivion is something you can play in an almost-complete state right now if you wanted, and I don’t think a C&D in a few month’s time will stop modders from finishing it anyways since it’s so close to completion.

It wouldn’t be the first sort of game that Microsoft has remastered in that style, though.

The Halo 1 and 2 remasters used a separate rendering layer over the original game which included updated art assets, and a setting to toggle between the original graphics and the updated ones on the fly. For the most part it was fine, but there were a couple of (primarily out of bounds) areas where the original collision did not always align with the updated geometry.

But I am hoping that it is more than just a simple rendering layer over the original game, because like you said it would require more hands-on work to improve things like forest density and interior clutter. It would look odd if they just increased the polygon count of foliage while still leaving it as sparse in places as the original. At least based on the leaked screenshots, the side-by-sides do give the impression that things have moved slightly and additional objects have been added, so extra rendering layer or not, my guess is that edits to the original game are also still involved (and likely means there won’t be a Halo-style graphics toggle button).

My copium is maybe we get a little update with this announcement. Not thinking it likely, but this whole Oblivion shadowdrop move would tie in well with a statement that ES6 is still coming and this is their way of tiding people over until then.

My only thing is that Oblivion does not play well on newer hardware. It was a bit of an ordeal to try to get it running well on my PC where I have two monitors, since it only runs on whichever monitor is primary and only if in Fullscreen mode. And don’t even think about alt-tabbing to check Discord, or it just crashes.

If it got the OpenMW treatment, I’d be thrilled with even that.

Agreed, though one would think they’d have taken steps to C&D Skyblivion the very moment they decided to move forward with their own project if that was their intent. It wouldn’t make much sense otherwise to let Skyblivion keep going this whole time if they saw it as a threat to their profits, since the mod is pretty close to completion at this point.

I’m guessing not likely, if only because we’ve already seen mod compatibility take a hit for less drastic engine updates (Skyrim vs Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 vs Fallout 4 next-gen). The work they’re doing seems more extensive than those examples, so I wouldn’t expect old mods to work, but maybe they could be recreated or converted through community effort.

As another user already said, this remaster is being done by an outside studio, so it shouldn’t be significantly affecting any ongoing work at Bethesda.

While Todd Howard is full of shit half the time, I do believe him when he talks about their development roadmap. When Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, it was under the disclaimer that it was not an active project for the team at the time, and would not enter full production until Starfield was done. Starfield released in fall of 2023, so Elder Scrolls 6 should have been in full development for about a year and a half now.